{"id":30266,"date":"2024-07-30T03:33:35","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T08:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=30266"},"modified":"2024-07-30T03:34:48","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T08:34:48","slug":"musk-accuses-google-of-election-interference-over-trump-autocomplete-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=30266","title":{"rendered":"Musk accuses Google of election interference over Trump autocomplete results"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Elon Musk has repeatedly accused Google<\/a> of being biased against former President Donald Trump in a series of X posts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk, who has endorsed<\/a>\u2002Trump<\/a>, and other influential conservative critics primarily focused on Google\u2019s autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions based on what you\u2019ve typed into the search bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In screenshots reposted by Musk, Google suggestions for \u201cassassination attempt of\u201d and \u201cpresident donald\u201d don\u2019t show Trump in the autocomplete predictions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When some users typed \u201cassassination attempt of\u201d into the search bar, the top autocomplete suggestions appeared to be for former President Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley. On July 13, Trump was shot in the ear during a failed assassination attempt<\/a> at a rally in Pennsylvania. Numerous conservative commentators speculated that Trump being left out of the suggestions was an intentional effort to influence the November election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBig Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris,\u201d Donald Trump Jr. posted Sunday on X<\/a>. \u201cWe all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.\u201d Musk shared and commented on<\/a> a similar post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When NBC News typed in \u201cassassination attempt of,\u201d it got similar results \u2014 Trump didn\u2019t appear in the autocomplete predictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk also posted<\/a> that Google had a \u201csearch ban\u201d on Trump because didn\u2019t appear in some users\u2019 autocomplete predictions for \u201cpresident donald.\u201d His post quickly went viral, racking up 81.9 million views and 779,500 likes. Other<\/a> users<\/a> said they were seeing the same results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the screenshots, when users searched for \u201cpresident donald,\u201d the Google autocomplete predictions appeared to be \u201cpresident donald duck\u201d and \u201cpresident donald regan.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cElection interference?\u201d Musk asked in a post including the screenshots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Monday, when NBC News typed in \u201cpresident\u201d in Google\u2019s search bar, the first autocomplete prediction was for Trump. President Joe Biden appeared below on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a statement, a Google spokesperson told NBC News that the Autocomplete feature was experiencing some issues Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAutocomplete is currently not working as intended for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president,\u201d a Google spokesperson said. \u201cWe\u2019re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon. Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google added that autocomplete predictions are suggestions and that users can search for whatever content they\u2019re interested in. It said no manual action had been taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk continued to call out Google late Monday afternoon, resharing posts showing that searches about Trump had surfaced news about Harris, instead. One screenshot showed Google generating a header reading \u201cNews about Harris\u201d in response to a query about Trump. When Harris\u2019 name was typed into the Google search, the news results were also about her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWow,\u201d Musk said<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When NBC News searched for Trump and Harris on Google, the news articles that appeared focused on the person whose name was searched for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google addressed the screenshots in a post on X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSome context here: These labels are automatically generated based on common topics across many news articles, and they change over time,\u201d the Google Communications account posted on X<\/a> with screenshots. \u201cA search today for Kamala Harris showed Top Stories labeled with \u2018Donald Trump,\u2019 because many articles cover the two of them together. You can see this happening across many topics, like the Olympics, other public figures, companies and more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The posts caught the attention of a number of Republican politicians, including Rep. Chip Roy<\/a>, of Texas, who showed a screenshot of his own autocomplete predictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sen. Roger Marshall, of Kansas, posted on X<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019ll be making an official inquiry into @google this week \u2014 I look forward to their response.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to a tweet from Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski calling for an investigation, Musk affirmed the sentiment, simply responding<\/a> \u201cYeah.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk has repeatedly accused Google of being biased against former President Donald Trump in a series of X posts.  Musk, who has endorsed\u2002Trump, and other influential conservative critics primarily focused on Google\u2019s autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions based on what you\u2019ve typed into the search bar. In screenshots reposted by Musk, Google suggestions for \u201cassassination attempt of\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30267,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5783],"tags":[2581,1330,2195,1230],"class_list":["post-30266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sci-tech","tag-google","tag-musk","tag-search","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30268,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30266\/revisions\/30268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}